Blaze

“Topping area news is an apparent kidnapping in Ocoma Heights,” the announcer said. Blaze stopped stirring his potatoes around in the frying pan and listened carefully. “Joseph Gerard IV, infant heir to the Gerard shipping fortune, was taken from the Gerards’ Ocoma Heights estate either late last night or early this morning. A sister of Joseph Gerard, the boy’s great-grandfather — once known as ‘the boy wonder of American shipping’ — was found unconscious on the kitchen floor by the family cook early this morning. Norma Gerard, said to be in her mid- seventies, was taken to the Maine Medical Center, where her condition is listed as critical. When asked if he had called for FBI assistance, Castle County Sheriff John D. Kellahar said he could not comment at this time. He would also not comment on the possibility of a ransom note —”

Oh yeah, Blaze thought. I got to send one of those.

“— but he did say police have a number of leads which are being actively investigated.”

Like what? Blaze wondered, and smiled a little. They always said stuff like that. What leads could they have, if the old lady was el zonko? He had even taken the ladder with him. They said stuff like that, that was all.

He ate his breakfast on the floor and played with the baby.

When he got ready to go out that afternoon, the kid had been fed and freshly changed and lay sleeping in the cradle. Blaze had tinkered with the formula a little more, and this time had burped him halfway through. It worked real good. It worked like a charm. He’d also changed the kid’s diapers. At first all that green shit had scared him, but then he remembered. Peas.

“George? I’m going now.”

“Okay,” George said from the bedroom.

“You better come out here and watch him. In case he wakes up.”

“I will, don’t worry.”

“Yeah,” Blaze said, without conviction. George was dead. He was talking to a dead man. He was asking a dead man to babysit. “Hey, George. Maybe I oughta —”

“Oughtta-shmotta, coulda-woulda. Go on, get out of here.”

“George —”

“Go on, I said! Roll!”

Blaze went.

The day was bright and sparkling and a little warmer. After a week of single-number temperatures, twenty degrees felt like a heatwave. But there was no pleasure in the sunshine, no pleasure to be had in driving the back roads to Portland. He didn’t trust George with the baby. He didn’t know why, but he sure didn’t. Because, see, now George was a part of himself, and he most likely took all the parts with him when he went somewhere, even the George part. Didn’t that make sense?

Blaze thought it did.

And then he started wondering about the woodstove. What if the house burned down?

This morbid picture entered his head and wouldn’t leave. A chimney fire from the stove he’d stoked special so Joe wouldn’t be cold if he kicked off his blanket. Sparks sputtering from the chimney onto the roof. Most dying, but one spark finding a dry shingle and catching hot, reaching out to the explosively dry clapboards beneath. The flames then racing across the beams. The baby beginning to cry as the first tendrils of smoke grew thicker and thicker…

He suddenly realized he had pushed the stolen Ford up to seventy. He eased off the accelerator. That was worse and more of it.

He parked in the Casco Street lot, gave the attendant a couple of bucks, and went around to Walgreens. He picked up an Evening Express, then went to the rack of paperbacks by the soda fountain. A lot of Westerns. Gothics. Mysteries. Science fiction. And then, on the bottom shelf, a thick book with a smiling, hairless baby on the cover. He worked out the title quickly; there were no hard words in it. Child and Baby Care. There was a picture of an old dude surrounded by kids on the back cover. Probably the guy who wrote it.

He paid for his stuff and shook open the newspaper going out the door. He stopped suddenly on the sidewalk, mouth open.

There was a picture of him on the front page.

Not a photo, he saw with relief, but a police drawing, one of those they made with Identi-Kits. It wasn’t even that good. They didn’t have the bashed-in place in his forehead. His eyes were the wrong shape. His lips were nowhere near that thick. But somehow it was still recognizably him.

The old lady must have woken up, then. Only the subheading did away with that idea, and in a hurry.

FBI ENTERS SEARCH FOR BABYNAPPERS

Norma Gerard Succumbs to Head Injury

Special to the

Evening Express

By James T. Mears

THE MAN WHO DROVE the getaway car in the Gerard baby kidnapping — and possibly the only kidnapper — is pictured on this page, in an

Evening Express

exclusive. The drawing was made by Portland P.D. sketch artist John Black from a description given by Morton Walsh, a night attendant at Oakwood, a new high-rise condominium tower a quarter of a mile from the Gerard family compound.